Even though my mother lives all the way in New Jersey, she’s currently retired and single, so she doesn’t think much of driving out to see us on a whim, without checking if it’s okay. Amazingly, Jason doesn’t seem bothered by it. His own mother died from breast cancer when he was in college, and his father passed away only a year later from a heart attack. （“He died of a broken heart,” Jason told me.） So he likes having the kids’ only grandparent around. I like having her here, but I wish she’d call.
Still, I have nowhere else to go. So it looks like I have to deal with whatever she wants.
As soon as I enter the house, I hear her clanging around in the kitchen. My mother loves the kitchen. She’s always buying us some new gadget to use in there. The last thing she got me was an instant pot last month. She spent twenty minutes raving about all the great stuff she could cook with it. Since then, it’s been collecting dust in the corner of my kitchen. I know that thing makes great soup, but I don’t like soup.
“Erika!” Sure enough, my mother is fiddling with our coffee machine. She’s the one who bought it for us, along with a year’s supply of coffee pods. Her gray hair is gathered into a bun, and she has her tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose. “I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour! Is everything okay?”
I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question. My mother and I are close—she’s the first person I told when Jason popped the question—but I never shared my fears about Liam with her. What can I say? He was her first grandchild—her only grandson. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her he was anything less than the perfect little angel she believed him to be. Liam is always oozing with charm around my mother. She can’t see through him the way I do.
“Everything is fine,” I choke out.
Mom picks up her cup of coffee. She has selected one of the mugs with four-year-old Liam’s face on it. He looks so cute in that picture—freckles across his nose and missing one of his front teeth. But all I can think about is how that was the year I first started to realize what he was really like.
“I heard about that girl who disappeared,” she says. “How terrifying. I’m surprised you let Hannah out of the house.”
I clear my throat. “I’m sure she’ll turn up.”
“That’s the worst thing about having daughters,” she says. “You’re always worried about stuff like that. With Liam, you don’t need to worry.”
I think about the map that popped up in my car. The gap of time when he was gone last night. It’s got to be a coincidence.
Please, God, let this girl have run away. Or anything that doesn’t involve my son…
I plop down on the sofa, too upset to attempt to do anything else. My mother joins me with her coffee cup. The sofa shifts as she sits beside me.
“Listen, Erika,” she says quietly. “I have to tell you, this isn’t a social call. There’s something I need to tell you. And… it’s… it’s not going to be easy.”
I sit up straight. What does she want to tell me? Does my mother have cancer? Is that how the rest of this horrible day is going to unfold? I feel like I’m going to throw up. “What’s wrong?”
She lowers her eyes. “You’re going to hate me.”
I look at my mother’s face. Even though the wrinkles are new from when I was a child, she still looks the same to me somehow. She’s the same brave woman who raised me all by herself after my father was hit by a car and killed. She didn’t date all through my childhood, because she said she wanted to focus on me. It’s only in the last ten years that she started to have occasional flings and travel. I can’t imagine what sort of thing she could possibly say that would make me hate her.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I haven’t…” She heaves a sigh and looks out the window. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Erika. There are things you don’t know. Things I have to tell you now, before you find out on your own.”
She’s really beginning to scare me. “Well, what is it?”
“It’s… it’s about your father.”
“My father?” I conjure up the image of a handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes in the one photograph I keep in my bedside drawer. My memories of him are patchy at best. I remember the scratchiness of his face and the smell of cigarette smoke that used to cling to him. He died when I was not quite four years old, so he never lived to see me grow up. He never lived to see the grandson who looks more like him every single day. “What about my father?”